Tabula Raza

Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science

Duana Fullwiley

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9780520401181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Duana Fullwiley has penned an intimate chronicle of laboratory life in the genomic age. She presentsmany of the influential scientists at the forefront of genetics who have redefined how we practice medicine and law and understand ancestry in an era of big data and waning privacy. Exceedingly relatable and human, the scientists in these pages often struggle for visibility, teeter on the tightrope of inclusion, andwork tirelessly to imprint the future. As they actively imagine a more equal and just world, they often findthemselves ensnared in reproducing timeworn conceits of race and racism that can seed the same healthdisparities they hope to resolve. Nothing dynamic can live for long as a blank slate, an innocenttabula rasa. But how the blank slateof the once-raceless human genome became one of racial differences, in various forms of what Fullwileycalls the tabularaza, has a very specific and familiar history—one that has cycled through the ages inunexpected ways.

Table of contents

• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Skin and Code
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: America and the Tabula Raza
• 1. Genomic World Building: The Mundus Novus of the Twenty-first Century
• 2. From Mundus to Model to Mundus Again: The Art of Ancestry between Worlds
• 3. Making Race: Pharmacogenetics and Its Necessary People
• 4. For the Love of Blackness: When Science Can Feel Like Home
• 5. Look, a Black Guy! (With a Genetic Finding)
• 6. A Family Affair: The Barbed Bonds of Relationship
• 7. Sci Non-Fi: Cells, Genes, and the Future Tense of “Diversity”
• 8. Seeing Ghosts: From the Excavated Past to the Hauntings of the Present
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index